Leo stared at the numbers. The gap to the leader was 18.3 seconds. In four laps, he had lost nearly twenty seconds to a machine.

"Eighteen seconds in four laps," he muttered. He felt a cold hollow opening up in his chest. "At this rate, I won’t just lose. I’ll be lapped. I’ll be a footnote in my own hell."

He drove through the tunnel, the yellow lights flashing overhead like a countdown. He was doing everything right. He was using the skills. He was hitting the apexes. He was faster than Marco. He was faster than any driver Arcadia had ever employed.

And he was getting crushed.

"Every single one of them is significantly better than Marco," he realized. The thought was a heavy weight. He had spent his life looking up to the drivers on the grid, thinking of them as the peak of human capability. But the Simex system didn’t care about human peaks. It cared about the "Average Specialist."

To the AI, the best drivers in the world were just a baseline. A starting point.

Leo was running at S+ reaction speed. His "Racing Instinct" was literally breaking the system’s ability to categorize it. His "Track Adaptation" was at ninety-four percent. He was a god of the telemetry, a master of the friction circle.

And he was in seventh place.

Laps seventy-five through seventy-nine were a blur of failure. The broadcast called it "the dominance phase," but for Leo, it was a meat grinder. No matter what he did, the Ghost Drivers were one step ahead. If he braked late, they braked later. If he took a wider line for better exit speed, they squeezed him at the apex.

He was racing against the ceiling of human possibility, and the ceiling was made of reinforced concrete.

By the end of lap seventy-nine, he was physically and mentally spent. His left arm was trembling from the constant haptic feedback of the gear changes. His eyes were burning from the strain of staring through the digital spray. He felt the familiar pull of the "Critical Low" mental stability warning at the edge of his vision.

[SIMEX BROADCAST, LAP 9 of 30 (79) REVIEW:]

[LEO KAITO: 0 points. Ranked 7th.]

[The Ghost Drivers represent Phase 1: ’Average Specialist’ ceiling.]

[LEO KAITO is not yet at that ceiling.]

[Phase 2: Elite. Phase 3: Apex. Phase 4: Legend. Phase 5: Singularity.]

Leo read the list of phases. He was still in Phase 1. He hadn’t even reached the level of a competitive professional driver yet. All the pain, all the million laps he had ahead of him, he was still at the bottom of the mountain.

He sat on the grid for the start of lap eighty, the rain dripping down the canopy in long, rhythmic streaks. He felt the silence of the pod.

’Twenty-one laps,’ he thought. ’And I have been driving the same race for nine of them.’

He looked at his hands. They were steady, but they felt like they belonged to someone else. He had been racing like an engineer. He had been treating the track like a math problem.

’If I brake at X and turn at Y, the result will be Z.’

It was the way he had been trained. It was the way he had survived the first seventy laps. But the Ghost Drivers weren’t solving math problems. They were the math. They didn’t have to think about the friction circle because they ’were’ the friction circle.

GD-03 was the worst of them. It was a mirror. Every time Leo thought of a new tactic, he was essentially uploading that tactic into the AI’s database. He was teaching his own enemy how to kill him.

"The more I adapt, the better it knows me," Leo whispered. He felt a strange, hysterical laugh bubbling up in his throat. "I’m the one giving it the weapons."

He thought back to lap forty-three. The lap where the circuit had stopped being a collection of corners. He remembered the feeling of the car becoming an extension of his nervous system. He hadn’t been "deciding" to turn back then. He had just been turning.

"GD-03 knows what I’m going to do because I decide what I’m going to do," he realized. The clarity of the thought was like a lightning strike. "The moment the thought forms in my head, the telemetry reflects it. The steering input, the throttle pressure, the AI reads the intention before the action is even finished." 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝙚𝙬𝓮𝙗𝒏𝙤𝒗𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝒐𝓶

He looked at the silver car of GD-03 sitting two rows ahead of him on the grid. It was a perfect copy of his own potential.

"What if I stop deciding?"

The question hung in the air. It was a terrifying thought. To a man like Leo, a man who lived by data and logic, "not deciding" felt like suicide. It felt like letting go of the wheel at two hundred miles per hour.

But the logic he had been using was failing him. The engineering was "insufficient."

[SIMEX BROADCAST, LAP 10 of 30 (80) OPENING:]

[Twenty laps remain. Gap to leader: Mathematically irrecoverable.]

[Bonus Freedom Unit: Awarded to P1 at lap 100.]

[LEO KAITO: 0 points. GD-02: Lead by 34.]

[Mathematics do not favour the human driver.]

"The math doesn’t matter," Leo said. He shifted the car into first gear. "The math is for people who are still human."

He closed his eyes for a second, letting the sound of the nine other engines wash over him. He stopped looking at the HUD. He stopped looking at the braking markers. He stopped looking at the "Safe Path" overlay.

He reached into the back of his mind, into that dark, quiet space where the million laps lived. He didn’t want the technician. He didn’t want the engineer. He wanted the monster that the simulation had been carving out of him for the last few...

He wanted the part of him that didn’t care about the pain. The part of him that didn’t care about the "Average Specialist" ceiling.